In my career as a Freelance Journalist , for nearly one and half years I wrote for the kids' and youth sections of the Nation newspaper which I enjoyed thoroughly . When I moved to Daily News I couldn't publish a few that I had already written for The Nation. This particular story was one of them. I am delighted that the series is resumed to www.nightowls.lk. You'll find more in the series as you scroll down.
 |
| Picture credits: Tony J | Yohan Siriwardena |
May be you should visit the beach. Stand where you’d like to be. When it is twilight or when dusk is about to enter, look straight. Head up. And then down. Down. Slowly. You will see the sun sinking down. As if the sea is pulling sun into water. We call it sun set .But sun does not sink. Sun sets because earth rotates. Day and night happens that way.
Think of sea tides. Sea wave rises and falls back again at several times of the day. As the moon travels around the earth and as they, together, travel around the sun, the combined gravitational forces cause the world's oceans to rise and fall. Maybe the ocean once belonged to the moon and that’s why it is falling towards the earth. May be that is why the moon is constantly pulling onto earth. Trying to touch it once more.
In Einstein’s description of the universe, gravity is a bending of 4D space time. Objects like stars bend more fabric than you and I, and objects that are nearer to each other are pulled by gravitational attraction than objects that are far away from each. Think of some one whom you love a lot. In fact faraway love is interesting. We do not need to look too far ahead to appreciate people who are away from us. They are by your side, now and then, among flowers and pictures, words and places. It is a strange mix of presence and absence. There is gravity pulling you towards people that are near to your heart. Like moon pulling the earth because earth is closer to moon. Who knows , perhaps there can be a girl thinking of a boy in a faraway place and a boy thinking of a girl living in a faraway house.
There are pebbles. Take a pebble and throw up. The pebble comes down. What of kites? Kites fly high and fall back. Crosswinds and storms can bring them down. Eventually everything falls. Even leaves fall. And they curl up in soil. Everything gets collected to earth’s core because of gravity’s effect. But that does not mean you cannot try throwing up a pebble again or fly a kite again. All it needs is some determination.
Take simple things. How do we get rain? The groundwater or what we call as the water those runoff mountains, the water in lakes, sea water and the water that is transpired by plants is condensed to the sun’s heat and evaporates with air, forming tiny droplets in clouds. When the clouds meet cool air over land, rain is triggered, and water returns to the land or sea. Once it rains, rain doesn’t stop there. Rain comes again and again. Because the same water that falls down is taken up by sun’s heat again. So you see that there’s a way to take things up when they fall down.
Did you think of how you get electricity? The power comes from the electricity department. Electricity Department gets it through the main unit. The main unit receives power from turbines. Turbines generate energy using water. So, electricity energy is produced by water, and we get water when it falls from a high altitude to a low altitude. Now did you see the use of water falling from top to below?
We also fall . Like rain and everything else. Like the water that fall from mountains. We fail to do things. We lose in competetions. We may run short of marks to enter University . We may lose in a business . But we forget that there is energy to go up again. Instead we keep on worrying and getting disappointed. We do not learn to transform obstacles into opportunities and try doing it again. Next time you fall, think of electricity or think of the groundwater that evaporates, falls down and goes up again. We all need to fall . So we can learn to pick ourselves up.
Other articles in the series :
0 comments:
Post a Comment